Singapore, the 19th ISA and IPEA appointed by WIPO

Singapore begins operations as the 19th International Searching and Preliminary Examining Authority (ISA/IPEA) under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) on 1 September 2015.

Around 95% of patent examiners at the IP Office of Singapore (IPOS) are PHD holders in their expert areas including Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals, Chemistry, Materials, Infocomm Technologies, and Engineering. The growing importance of the need to search in the Chinese language is underscored by the fact that patent applications in China grew at an annual average of more than 30 per cent from 2009 to 2012. IPOS is uniquely placed to serve this need, by conduct searches in not just English but also in Chinese for prior art in both languages. The International Search Report (ISR) thus provided by IPOS shall provide both English and Chinese prior art documents, the latter with machine translation to facilitate the ease of understanding. IPOS is honoured to be recognized as an International Authority in WIPO for patent search and examination. This is an international quality endorsement of the services provided by IPOS.” Credit: